The Disruption Machine

What the gospel of innovation gets wrong.

Jill Lepore[1] June 23, 2014
In the last years of the nineteen-eighties, I worked not at startups but at what might be
called finish-downs. Tech companies that were dying would hire tempscollege
students and new graduatesto do what little was left of the work of the employees
theyd laid off. This was in Cambridge, near M.I.T. Id type users manuals, save them
onto 5.25-inch floppy disks, and send them to a line printer that yammered like a set of
prank-shop chatter teeth, but, by the time the last perforated page coiled out of it, the
equipment whose functions those manuals explained had been discontinued. Wed work
a month here, a week there. There wasnt much to do. Mainly, we sat at our desks and
wrote wishy-washy poems on keyboards manufactured by Digital Equipment
Corporation, left one another sly messages on pink While You Were Out sticky notes,
swapped paperback novelsKurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel Garca Mrquez,
that kind of thingand, during lunch hour, had assignations in empty, unlocked offices.
At Polaroid, I once found a Bantam Books edition of Steppenwolf in a clogged sink in
an employees bathroom, floating like a raft. In his heart he was not a man, but a wolf
of the steppes, it said on the bloated cover. The rest was unreadable.
Not long after that, I got a better assignment: answering the phone for Michael Porter, a
professor at the Harvard Business School. I was an assistant to his assistant. In 1985,
Porter had published a book called Competitive Advantage, in which he elaborated on
the three strategiescost leadership, differentiation, and focusthat hed described in
his 1980 book, Competitive Strategy. I almost never saw Porter, and, when I did, he
was dashing, affably, out the door, suitcase in hand. My job was to field inquiries from
companies that wanted to book him for speaking engagements. The Competitive
Advantage of Nations appeared in 1990. Porters ideas about business strategy reached
executives all over the world.

Porter was interested in how companies succeed. The scholar who in some respects
became his successor, Clayton M. Christensen, entered a doctoral program at the
Harvard Business School in 1989 and joined the faculty in 1992. Christensen was
interested in why companies fail. In his 1997 book, The Innovators Dilemma, he
argued that, very often, it isnt because their executives made bad decisions but because
they made good decisions, the same kind of good decisions that had made those
companies successful for decades. (The innovators dilemma is that doing the right
thing is the wrong thing.) As Christensen saw it, the problem was the velocity of
history, and it wasnt so much a problem as a missed opportunity, like a plane that takes
off without you, except that you didnt even know there was a plane, and had wandered
onto the airfield, which you thought was a meadow, and the plane ran you over during
takeoff. Manufacturers of mainframe computers made good decisions about making and
selling mainframe computers and devising important refinements to them in their
R. & D. departmentssustaining innovations, Christensen called thembut, busy
pleasing their mainframe customers, one tinker at a time, they missed what an entirely
untapped customer wanted, personal computers, the market for which was created by
what Christensen called disruptive innovation: the selling of a cheaper, poorerquality product that initially reaches less profitable customers but eventually takes over
and devours an entire industry.
Ever since The Innovators Dilemma, everyone is either disrupting or being disrupted.
There are disruption consultants, disruption conferences, and disruption seminars. This
fall, the University of Southern California is opening a new program: The degree is in
disruption, the university announced. Disrupt or be disrupted, the venture capitalist
Josh Linkner warns in a new book, The Road to Reinvention, in which he argues that
fickle consumer trends, friction-free markets, and political unrest, along with
dizzying speed, exponential complexity, and mind-numbing technology advances,
mean that the time has come to panic as youve never panicked before. Larry Downes
and Paul Nunes, who blog for Forbes, insist that we have entered a new and even scarier
stage: big bang disruption. This isnt disruptive innovation, they warn. Its
devastating innovation.
Things you own or use that are now considered to be the product of disruptive
innovation include your smartphone and many of its apps, which have disrupted
businesses from travel agencies and record stores to mapmaking and taxi dispatch. Much
more disruption, we are told, lies ahead. Christensen has co-written books urging
disruptive innovation in higher education (The Innovative University), public schools
(Disrupting Class), and health care (The Innovators Prescription). His acolytes and

imitators, including no small number of hucksters, have called for the disruption of
more or less everything else. If the company you work for has a chief innovation officer,
its because of the long arm of The Innovators Dilemma. If your citys public-school
district has adopted an Innovation Agenda, which has disrupted the education of every
kid in the city, you live in the shadow of The Innovators Dilemma. If you saw the
episode of the HBO sitcom Silicon Valley in which the characters attend a conference
called TechCrunch Disrupt 2014 (which is a real thing), and a guy from the stage, a Paul
Rudd look-alike, shouts, Let me hear it, DISSS-RUPPTTT!, you have heard the voice of
Clay Christensen, echoing across the valley.
Last month, days after the Times publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., fired Jill Abramson,
the papers executive editor, the Times 2014 Innovation Report was leaked. It includes
graphs inspired by Christensens Innovators Dilemma, along with a lengthy, glowing
summary of the books key arguments. The report explains, Disruption is a predictable
pattern across many industries in which fledgling companies use new technology to
offer cheaper and inferior alternatives to products sold by established players (think
Toyota taking on Detroit decades ago). Today, a pack of news startups are hoping to
disrupt our industry by attacking the strongest incumbentThe New York Times.
A pack of attacking startups sounds something like a pack of ravenous hyenas, but,
generally, the rhetoric of disruptiona language of panic, fear, asymmetry, and disorder
calls on the rhetoric of another kind of conflict, in which an upstart refuses to play by
the established rules of engagement, and blows things up. Dont think of Toyota taking
on Detroit. Startups are ruthless and leaderless and unrestrained, and they seem so tiny
and powerless, until you realize, but only after its too late, that theyre devastatingly
dangerous: Bang! Ka-boom! Think of it this way: the Times is a nation-state; BuzzFeed
is stateless. Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.
Every age has a theory of rising and falling, of growth and decay, of bloom and wilt: a
theory of nature. Every age also has a theory about the past and the present, of what was
and what is, a notion of time: a theory of history. Theories of history used to be
supernatural: the divine ruled time; the hand of God, a special providence, lay behind
the fall of each sparrow. If the present differed from the past, it was usually worse:
supernatural theories of history tend to involve decline, a fall from grace, the loss of
Gods favor, corruption. Beginning in the eighteenth century, as the intellectual
historian Dorothy Ross once pointed out, theories of history became secular; then they
started something newhistoricism, the idea that all events in historical time can be
explained by prior events in historical time. Things began looking up. First, there was

that, then there was this, and this is better than that. The eighteenth century embraced
the idea of progress; the nineteenth century had evolution; the twentieth century had
growth and then innovation. Our era has disruption, which, despite its futurism, is
atavistic. Its a theory of history founded on a profound anxiety about financial collapse,
an apocalyptic fear of global devastation, and shaky evidence.
Most big ideas have loud critics. Not disruption. Disruptive innovation as the
explanation for how change happens has been subject to little serious criticism, partly
because its headlong, while critical inquiry is unhurried; partly because disrupters
ridicule doubters by charging them with fogyism, as if to criticize a theory of change
were identical to decrying change; and partly because, in its modern usage, innovation
is the idea of progress jammed into a criticism-proof jack-in-the-box.
The idea of progressthe notion that human history is the history of human betterment
dominated the world view of the West between the Enlightenment and the First
World War. It had critics from the start, and, in the last century, even people who
cherish the idea of progress, and point to improvements like the eradication of
contagious diseases and the education of girls, have been hard-pressed to hold on to it
while reckoning with two World Wars, the Holocaust and Hiroshima, genocide and
global warming. Replacing progress with innovation skirts the question of whether
a novelty is an improvement: the world may not be getting better and better but our
devices are getting newer and newer.
The word innovateto make newused to have chiefly negative connotations: it
signified excessive novelty, without purpose or end. Edmund Burke called the French
Revolution a revolt of innovation; Federalists declared themselves to be enemies to
innovation. George Washington, on his deathbed, was said to have uttered these
words: Beware of innovation in politics. Noah Webster warned in his dictionary, in
1828, It is often dangerous to innovate on the customs of a nation.
The redemption of innovation began in 1939, when the economist Joseph Schumpeter,
in his landmark study of business cycles, used the word to mean bringing new products
to market, a usage that spread slowly, and only in the specialized literatures of
economics and business. (In 1942, Schumpeter theorized about creative destruction;
Christensen, retrofitting, believes that Schumpeter was really describing disruptive
innovation.) Innovation began to seep beyond specialized literatures in the nineteennineties, and gained ubiquity only after 9/11. One measure: between 2011 and 2014,
Time, the Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Forbes,and even Better Homes and Gardens

published special innovation issuesthe modern equivalents of what, a century ago,

were known as sketches of men of progress.
The idea of innovation is the idea of progress stripped of the aspirations of the
Enlightenment, scrubbed clean of the horrors of the twentieth century, and relieved of
its critics. Disruptive innovation goes further, holding out the hope of salvation against
the very damnation it describes: disrupt, and you will be saved.
Disruptive innovation as a theory of change is meant to serve both as a chronicle of the
past (this has happened) and as a model for the future (it will keep happening). The
strength of a prediction made from a model depends on the quality of the historical
evidence and on the reliability of the methods used to gather and interpret it. Historical
analysis proceeds from certain conditions regarding proof. None of these conditions
have been met.
The Innovators Dilemma consists of a set of handpicked case studies, beginning with
the disk-drive industry, which was the subject of Christensens doctoral thesis, in 1992.
Nowhere in the history of business has there been an industry like disk drives,
Christensen writes, which makes it a very odd choice for an investigation designed to
create a model for understanding other industries. The first hard-disk drive, which
weighed more than a ton, was invented at I.B.M., in 1955, by a team that included Alan
Shugart. Christensen is chiefly concerned with an era, beginning in the late nineteenseventies, when disk drives decreased in size from fourteen inches to eight, then from
eight to 5.25, from 5.25 to 3.5, and from 3.5 to 2.5 and 1.8. He counts a hundred and
sixteen new technologies, and classes a hundred and eleven as sustaining innovations
and five as disruptive innovations. Each of these five, he says, introduced smaller disk
drives that were slower and had lower capacity than those used in the mainstream
market, and each company that adopted them was an entrant firm that toppled an
established firm. In 1973, Alan Shugart founded Shugart Associates, which introduced a
5.25-inch floppy-disk drive in 1976; the company was bought by Xerox the next year. In
1978, Shugart Associates developed an eight-inch hard-disk drive; Christensen, who is
uninterested in the floppy-disk-drive industry, classes the company as an entrant firm
and credits it with disrupting established firms that manufactured fourteen-inch hard
drives. In 1979, Alan Shugart founded Shugart Technology, which changed its name to
Seagate Technology after Xerox threatened to sue. In 1980, Seagate Technology
introduced the first 5.25-inch hard-disk drive; Christensen, at this point, classes Seagate
as an entrant firm, and Shugart Associates as a failed incumbent, even though Shugart
Associates was shifting its focus to what was then its very profitable floppy-disk-drive

business. In the mid-eighties, Seagatehere considered by Christensen to be an

established firmdelayed manufacturing 3.5-inch drives, which were valued by
producers of portable computers and laptops, because its biggest customer, I.B.M.,
didnt want them; I.B.M. wanted a better and faster version of the 5.25-inch drive for its
full-sized desktop computers. Seagate didnt start shipping 3.5-inch drives until 1988,
and by then, Christensen argues, it was too late.
In his original research, Christensen established the cutoff for measuring a companys
success or failure as 1989 and explained that successful firms were arbitrarily defined
as those which achieved more than fifty million dollars in revenues in constant 1987
dollars in any single year between 1977 and 1989even if they subsequently withdrew
from the market. Much of the theory of disruptive innovation rests on this arbitrary
definition of success.
In fact, Seagate Technology was not felled by disruption. Between 1989 and 1990, its
sales doubled, reaching $2.4 billion, more than all of its U.S. competitors combined,
according to an industry report. In 1997, the year Christensen published The
Innovators Dilemma, Seagate was the largest company in the disk-drive industry,
reporting revenues of nine billion dollars. Last year, Seagate shipped its two-billionth
disk drive. Most of the entrant firms celebrated by Christensen as triumphant disrupters,
on the other hand, no longer exist, their success having been in some cases brief and in
others illusory. (The fleeting nature of their success is, of course, perfectly consistent
with his model.) Between 1982 and 1984, Micropolis made the disruptive leap from
eight-inch to 5.25-inch drives through what Christensen credits as the Herculean
managerial effort of its C.E.O., Stuart Mahon. (Mahon remembers the experience as
the most exhausting of his life, Christensen writes.) But, shortly thereafter, Micropolis,
unable to compete with companies like Seagate, failed. MiniScribe, founded in 1980,
started out selling 5.25-inch drives and saw quick success. That was MiniScribes hour
of glory, the companys founder later said. We had our hour of infamy shortly after
that. In 1989, MiniScribe was investigated for fraud and soon collapsed; a report
charged that the companys practices included fabricated financial reports and shipping
bricks and scrap parts disguised as disk drives.
As striking as the disruption in the disk-drive industry seemed in the nineteen-eighties,
more striking, from the vantage of history, are the continuities. Christensen argues that
incumbents in the disk-drive industry were regularly destroyed by newcomers. But
today, after much consolidation, the divisions that dominate the industry are divisions
that led the market in the nineteen-eighties. (In some instances, what shifted was their

ownership: I.B.M. sold its hard-disk division to Hitachi, which later sold its division to
Western Digital.) In the longer term, victory in the disk-drive industry appears to have
gone to the manufacturers that were good at incremental improvements, whether or not
they were the first to market the disruptive new format. Companies that were quick to
release a new product but not skilled at tinkering have tended to flame out.
Other cases in The Innovators Dilemma are equally murky. In his account of the
mechanical-excavator industry, Christensen argues that established companies that
built cable-operated excavators were slow to recognize the importance of the hydraulic
excavator, which was developed in the late nineteen-forties. Almost the entire
population of mechanical shovel manufacturers was wiped out by a disruptive
technologyhydraulicsthat the leaders customers and their economic structure had
caused them initially to ignore, he argues. Christensen counts thirty established
companies in the nineteen-fifties and says that, by the nineteen-seventies, only four
had survived the entrance into the industry of thirteen disruptive newcomers, including
Caterpillar, O. & K., Demag, and Hitachi. But, in fact, many of Christensens new
entrants had been making cable-operated shovels for years. O. & K., founded in 1876,
had been making them since 1908; Demag had been building excavators since 1925,
when it bought a company that built steam shovels; Hitachi, founded in 1910, sold
cable-operated shovels before the Second World War. Manufacturers that were
genuinely new to excavation equipment tended to sell a lot of hydraulic excavators, if
they had a strong distribution network, and then not do so well. And some established
companies disrupted by hydraulics didnt do half as badly as Christensen suggests.
Bucyrus is the old-line shovel-maker he writes about most. It got its start in Ohio, in
1880, built most of the excavators that dug the Panama Canal, and became Bucyrus-Erie
in 1927, when it bought the Erie Steam Shovel Company. It acquired a hydraulicsequipment firm in 1948, but, Christensen writes, faced precisely the same problem in
marketing its hydraulic backhoe as Seagate had faced with its 3.5-inch drives.
Unable to persuade its established consumers to buy a hydraulic excavator, Bucyrus
introduced a hybrid product, called the Hydrohoe, in 1951a merely sustaining
innovation. Christensen says that Bucyrus logged record profits until 1966the point
at which the disruptive hydraulics technology had squarely intersected with customers
needs, and then began to decline. This is typical of industries facing a disruptive
technology, he explains. The leading firms in the established technology remain
financially strong until the disruptive technology is, in fact, in the midst of their
mainstream market.

But, actually, between 1962 and 1979 Bucyruss sales grew sevenfold and its profits
grew twenty-five-fold. Was that so bad? In the nineteen-eighties, Bucyrus suffered. The
whole construction-equipment industry did: it was devastated by recession, inflation,
the oil crisis, a drop in home building, and the slowing of highway construction.
(Caterpillar sustained heavy losses, too.) In the early nineteen-nineties, after a
disastrous leveraged buyout handled by Goldman Sachs, Bucyrus entered Chapter 11
protection, but it made some sizable acquisitions when it emerged, as Bucyrus
International, and was a leading maker of mining equipment, just as it had been a
century earlier. Was it a failure? Caterpillar didnt think so when, in 2011, it bought the
firm for nearly nine billion dollars.
Christensens sources are often dubious and his logic questionable. His single citation
for his investigation of the disruptive transition from mechanical to electronic motor
controls, in which he identifies the Allen-Bradley Company as triumphing over four
rivals, is a book called The Bradley Legacy, an account published by a foundation
established by the companys founders. This is akin to calling an actor the greatest
talent in a generation after interviewing his publicist. Use theory to help guide data
collection, Christensen advises.
He finds further evidence of his theory in the disruption of the department store by the
discount store. Just as in disk drives and excavators, he writes, a few of the leading
traditional retailersnotably S. S. Kresge, F. W. Woolworth, and Dayton Hudsonsaw
the disruptive approach coming and invested early. In 1962, Kresge (which traces its
origins to 1897) opened Kmart; Dayton-Hudson (1902) opened Target; and Woolworth
(1879) opened Woolco. Kresge and Dayton-Hudson ran their discount stores as
independent organizations; Woolworth ran its discount store in-house. Kmart and
Target succeeded; Woolco failed. Christensen presents this story as yet more evidence of
an axiom derived from the disk-drive industry: two models for how to make money
cannot peacefully coexist within a single organization. In the mid-nineteen-nineties,
Kmart closed more than two hundred stores, a fact that Christensen does not include in
his account of the industrys history. (Kmart filed for bankruptcy in 2002.) Only in a
footnote does he make a vague allusion to Kmarts troubleswhen this book was being
written, Kmart was a crippled companyand then he dismisses this piece of counterevidence by fiat: Kmarts present competitive struggles are unrelated to Kresges
strategy in meeting the original disruptive threat of discounting.
In his discussion of the steel industry, in which he argues that established companies
were disrupted by the technology of minimilling (melting down scrap metal to make

cheaper, lower-quality sheet metal), Christensen writes that U.S. Steel, founded in
1901, lowered the cost of steel production from nine labor-hours per ton of steel
produced in 1980 to just under three hours per ton in 1991, which he attributes to the
companys ferociously attacking the size of its workforce, paring it from more than
93,000 in 1980 to fewer than 23,000 in 1991, in order to point out that even this
accomplishment could not stop the coming disruption. Christensen tends to ignore
factors that dont support his theory. Factors having effects on both production and
profitability that Christensen does not mention are that, between 1986 and 1987,
twenty-two thousand workers at U.S. Steel did not go to work, as part of a labor action,
and that U.S. Steels workers are unionized and have been for generations, while
minimill manufacturers, with their newer workforces, are generally non-union.
Christensens logic here seems to be that the industrys labor arrangements can have
played no role in U.S. Steels strugglesand are not even worth mentioningbecause
U.S. Steels struggles must be a function of its having failed to build minimills. U.S.
Steels struggles have been and remain grave, but its failure is by no means a matter of
historical record. Today, the largest U.S. producer of steel isU.S. Steel.
The theory of disruption is meant to be predictive. On March 10, 2000, Christensen
launched a $3.8-million Disruptive Growth Fund, which he managed with Neil Eisner, a
broker in St. Louis. Christensen drew on his theory to select stocks. Less than a year
later, the fund was quietly liquidated: during a stretch of time when the Nasdaq lost fifty
per cent of its value, the Disruptive Growth Fund lost sixty-four per cent. In 2007,
Christensen told Business Week that the prediction of the theory would be that Apple
wont succeed with the iPhone, adding, History speaks pretty loudly on that. In its
first five years, the iPhone generated a hundred and fifty billion dollars of revenue. In
the preface to the 2011 edition of The Innovators Dilemma, Christensen reports that,
since the books publication, in 1997, the theory of disruption continues to yield
predictions that are quite accurate. This is less because people have used his model to
make accurate predictions about things that havent happened yet than because
disruption has been sold as advice, and because much that happened between 1997 and
2011 looks, in retrospect, disruptive. Disruptive innovation can reliably be seen only
after the fact. History speaks loudly, apparently, only when you can make it say what
you want it to say. The popular incarnation of the theory tends to disavow history
altogether. Predicting the future based on the past is like betting on a football team
simply because it won the Super Bowl a decade ago, Josh Linkner writes in The Road
to Reinvention. His first principle: Let go of the past. It has nothing to tell you. But,
unless you already believe in disruption, many of the successes that have been labelled
disruptive innovation look like something else, and many of the failures that are often

seen to have resulted from failing to embrace disruptive innovation look like bad
management.
Christensen has compared the theory of disruptive innovation to a theory of nature: the
theory of evolution. But among the many differences between disruption and evolution
is that the advocates of disruption have an affinity for circular arguments. If an
established company doesnt disrupt, it will fail, and if it fails it must be because it
didnt disrupt. When a startup fails, thats a success, since epidemic failure is a hallmark
of disruptive innovation. (Stop being afraid of failure and start embracing it, the
organizers of FailCon, an annual conference, implore, suggesting that, in the era of
disruption, innovators face unprecedented challenges. For instance: maybe you made
the wrong hires?) When an established company succeeds, thats only because it hasnt
yet failed. And, when any of these things happen, all of them are only further evidence
of disruption.
The handpicked case study, which is Christensens method, is a notoriously weak
foundation on which to build a theory. But, if the handpicked case study is the approved
approach, it would seem that efforts at embracing disruptive innovation are often fatal.
Morrison-Knudsen, an engineering and construction firm, got its start in 1905 and
helped build more than a hundred and fifty dams all over the world, including the
Hoover. Beginning in 1988, a new C.E.O., William Agee, looked to new products and
new markets, and, after Bill Clintons election, in 1992, bet on mass transit, turning to
the construction of both commuter and long-distance train cars through two
subsidiaries, MK Transit and MK Rail. These disruptive businesses proved to be a
disaster. Morrison-Knudsen announced in 1995 that it had lost three hundred and fifty
million dollars, by which point the company had essentially collapsednot because it
didnt disruptively innovate but because it did. Time, Inc., founded in 1922, autodisrupted, too. In 1994, the company launched Pathfinder, an early new-media venture,
an umbrella Web site for its magazines, at a cost estimated to have exceeded a hundred
million dollars; the site was abandoned in 1999. Had Pathfinder been successful, it
would have been greeted, retrospectively, as evidence of disruptive innovation. Instead,
as one of its producers put it, its like it never existed.
In the late nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands, the financial-services industry
innovated by selling products like subprime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations,
and mortgage-backed securities, some to a previously untapped customer base. At the
time, Ed Clark was the C.E.O. of Canadas TD Bank, which traces its roots to 1855. Clark,
who earned a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard with a dissertation on public investment in

Tanzania, forswore Canadas version of this disruptive innovation, asset-backed

commercial paper. The decision made TD Bank one of the strongest banks in the world.
Between 2002 and 2012, TD Banks assets increased from $278 billion to $806 billion.
Since 2005, TD Bank has opened thirteen hundred branches in the United States,
bought Commerce Bank for $8.5 billion, in 2008, and adopted the motto Americas
Most Convenient Bank. With the money it earned by expanding its traditional banking
servicesalmost four billion dollars a year during the height of the financial crisis,
according to the Canadian business reporter Howard Greenit set about marketing
itself as the bank with the longest hours, the best teller services, and free dog biscuits.
When the financial-services industry disruptively innovated, it led to a global financial
crisis. Like the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the meltdown didnt dim the fervor for
disruption; instead, it fuelled it, because these products of disruption contributed to the
panic on which the theory of disruption thrives.
Disruptive innovation as an explanation for how change happens is everywhere. Ideas
that come from business schools are exceptionally well marketed. Faith in disruption is
the best illustration, and the worst case, of a larger historical transformation having to
do with secularization, and what happens when the invisible hand replaces the hand of
God as explanation and justification. Innovation and disruption are ideas that
originated in the arena of business but which have since been applied to arenas whose
values and goals are remote from the values and goals of business. People arent disk
drives. Public schools, colleges and universities, churches, museums, and many
hospitals, all of which have been subjected to disruptive innovation, have revenues and
expenses and infrastructures, but they arent industries in the same way that
manufacturers of hard-disk drives or truck engines or drygoods are industries.
Journalism isnt an industry in that sense, either.
Doctors have obligations to their patients, teachers to their students, pastors to their
congregations, curators to the public, and journalists to their readersobligations that
lie outside the realm of earnings, and are fundamentally different from the obligations
that a business executive has to employees, partners, and investors. Historically,
institutions like museums, hospitals, schools, and universities have been supported by
patronage, donations made by individuals or funding from church or state. The press has
generally supported itself by charging subscribers and selling advertising. (Underwriting
by corporations and foundations is a funding source of more recent vintage.) Charging
for admission, membership, subscriptions and, for some, earning profits are similarities
these institutions have with businesses. Still, that doesnt make them industries, which

turn things into commodities and sell them for gain.

In The Innovative University, written with Henry J. Eyring, who used to work at the
Monitor Group, a consulting firm co-founded by Michael Porter, Christensen subjected
Harvard, a college founded by seventeenth-century theocrats, to his case-study analysis.
Studying the universitys history, Christensen and Eyring wrote, will allow us to
move beyond the forlorn language of crisis to hopeful and practical strategies for
success. On the basis of this research, Christensen and Eyrings recommendations for
the disruption of the modern university include a mix of face-to-face and online
learning. The publication of The Innovative University, in 2011, contributed to a
frenzy for Massive Open Online Courses, or s, at colleges and universities across the
country, including a collaboration between Harvard and M.I.T., which was announced in
May of 2012. Shortly afterward, the University of Virginias panicked board of trustees
attempted to fire the president, charging her with jeopardizing the institutions future
by failing to disruptively innovate with sufficient speed; the vice-chair of the board
forwarded to the chair a Times column written by David Brooks, The Campus
Tsunami, in which he cited Christensen.
Christensen and Eyrings recommendation of a mix of face-to-face and online
learning was drawn from an investigation that involves a wildly misguided attempt to
apply standards of instruction in the twenty-first century to standards of instruction in
the seventeenth. One table in the book, titled Harvards Initial DNA, 1636-1707,
looks like this:
Initial Traits

Implications

Small, face-to-face classes

High faculty-student intimacy

Low instructional efficiency

Classical, religious

High moral content in the curriculum

instruction
Narrow curriculum with low practicality for nonpastors
Nonspecialized faculty

Dogmatic instruction
High faculty empathy for learners
Low faculty expertise

In 2014, there were twenty-one thousand students at Harvard. In 1640, there were
thirteen. The first year classes were held, Harvard students and their nonspecialized
faculty (one young schoolmaster, Nathaniel Eaton), enjoying small, face-to-face
classes (Eatons wife, who fed the students, was accused of putting goats dung in
their hasty pudding) with high faculty empathy for learners (Eaton conducted
thrashings with a stick of walnut said to have been big enough to have killed a horse),
could have paddled together in a single canoe. That doesnt mean good arguments cant
be made for online education. But theres nothing factually persuasive in this account of
its historical urgency and even inevitability, which relies on a method well outside
anything resembling plausible historical analysis.
Christensen and Eyring also urge universities to establish heavyweight innovation
teams: Christensen thinks that R. & D. departments housed within a business and
accountable to its executives are structurally unable to innovate disruptivelythey are
preoccupied with pleasing existing customers through incremental improvement.
Christensen argues, for instance, that if Digital Equipment Corporation, which was
doing very well making minicomputers in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, had
founded, in the eighties, a separate company at another location to develop the
personal computer, it might have triumphed. The logic of disruptive innovation is the
logic of the startup: establish a team of innovators, set a whiteboard under a blue sky,
and never ask them to make a profit, because there needs to be a wall of separation
between the people whose job is to come up with the best, smartest, and most creative
and important ideas and the people whose job is to make money by selling stuff.
Interestingly, a similar principle has existed, for more than a century, in the press. The
heavyweight innovation team? Thats what journalists used to call the newsroom.
Its readily apparent that, in a democracy, the important business interests of
institutions like the press might at times conflict with what became known as the
public interest. Thats why, a very long time ago, newspapers like the Times and
magazines like this one established a wall of separation between the editorial side of
affairs and the business side. (The metaphor is to the Jeffersonian wall between church
and state.) The wall dividing the newsroom and business side has served The Times
well for decades, according to the Times Innovation Report, allowing one side to
focus on readers and the other to focus on advertisers, as if this had been, all along,
simply a matter of office efficiency. But the notion of a wall should be abandoned,
according to the report, because it has hidden costs that thwart innovation. Earlier
this year, the Times tried to recruit, as its new head of audience development, Michael
Wertheim, the former head of promotion at the disruptive media outfit Upworthy.

Wertheim turned the Times job down, citing its wall as too big an obstacle to disruptive
innovation. The recommendation of the Innovation Report is to understand that both
sides, editorial and business, share, as their top priority, Reader Experience, which
can be measured, following Upworthy, in Attention Minutes. Vox Media, a digitalmedia disrupter that is mentioned ten times in the Times report and is included, along
with BuzzFeed, in a list of the Times strongest competitors (few of which are profitable),
called the report brilliant, shockingly good, and an insanely clear explanation of
disruption, but expressed the view that theres no way the Times will implement its
recommendations, because what the report doesnt mention is the sobering conclusion
of Christensens research: companies faced with disruptive threats almost never manage
to handle them gracefully.
Disruptive innovation is a theory about why businesses fail. Its not more than that. It
doesnt explain change. Its not a law of nature. Its an artifact of history, an idea, forged
in time; its the manufacture of a moment of upsetting and edgy uncertainty. Transfixed
by change, its blind to continuity. It makes a very poor prophet.
The upstarts who work at startups dont often stay at any one place for very long. (Three
out of four startups fail. More than nine out of ten never earn a return.) They work a year
here, a few months therezany hours everywhere. They wear jeans and sneakers and
ride scooters and share offices and sprawl on couches like Great Danes. Their coffee
machines look like dollhouse-size factories.
They are told that they should be reckless and ruthless. Their investors, if theyre like
Josh Linkner, tell them that the world is a terrifying place, moving at a devastating pace.
Today I run a venture capital firm and back the next generation of innovators who are,
as I was throughout my earlier career, dead-focused on eating your lunch, Linkner
writes. His job appears to be to convince a generation of people who want to do good
and do well to learn, instead, remorselessness. Forget rules, obligations, your
conscience, loyalty, a sense of the commonweal. If you start a business and it succeeds,
Linkner advises, sell it and take the cash. Dont look back. Never pause. Disrupt or be
disrupted.
But they do pause and they do look back, and they wonder. Meanwhile, they tweet, they
post, they tumble in and out of love, they ponder. They send one another sly messages,
touching the screens of sleek, soundless machines with a worshipful tenderness. They
swap novels: David Foster Wallace, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith.
Steppenwolf is still available in print, five dollars cheaper as an e-book. Hes a wolf,

hes a man. The rest is unreadable. So, as ever, is the future.

1. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/jill_lepore/search?contributorName=jill%20lepore